Andrew's Diary

Andrew's Diary http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/ Andrew Flegg's Diary, or 'blog' if you will. en Sun, 13 May 2007 06:32:50 GMT Sun, 13 May 2007 06:32:50 GMT http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/ Sunday, 01 January 2012 What do do with the website this year? Not sure. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=1/2012#01 Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:00:01 GMT Wednesday, 12 October 2011 Things were looking up for a while, but now it's trying to fix one (seemingly) interminable issue after another. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=10/2011#12 Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:00:00 GMT Friday, 13 May 2011 Back from Detroit. With Kathryn being sick with a suspected migraine, it wasn't exactly the welcome I was hoping for. I almost wish I was still away! http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=05/2011#13 Fri, 13 May 2011 12:00:00 GMT Wednesday, 11 May 2011 The Target stock tracker showed iPads in stock, and it was the one I wanted. Woohoo! (wish it could be jailbroken already, though). My first two credit cards were rejected - which is ridiculous given I'd used them both in the US this week already. Had a moan at NatWest and MBNA about their systems, but they said they couldn't turn it off, and they won't be adapting it to take into account sales in the jurisdiction: just "keep the number handy". FFS. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=05/2011#11 Wed, 11 May 2011 12:00:00 GMT Saturday, 16 April 2011 Shit. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=04/2011#16 Sat, 16 Apr 2011 12:00:00 GMT Saturday, 05 February 2011 5 months, 30 days to go http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=02/2011#05 Sat, 05 Feb 2011 12:00:00 GMT Saturday, 01 January 2011 Happy new year! http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=01/2011#01 Sat, 01 Jan 2011 12:00:00 GMT Tuesday, 07 December 2010 Doctor reckons it's just tendon damage where Mel stood on my foot, rather than a break. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=12/2010#07 Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:00:00 GMT Monday, 06 December 2010 Back in London - less cold than Stockholm, but less well wrapped up! Welcome back, of course, consisted of train delays in both directions. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=12/2010#06 Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:00:00 GMT Sunday, 05 December 2010 21 hours. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=12/2010#05 Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:00:00 GMT Saturday, 04 December 2010 My birthday started at 12am (CET) at the client Christmas party with my colleagues buying a bottle of Bollinger and getting Happy Birthday sung to me in Swedish, and then English. It ended with an early night: I was tired through travelling and Mel was tired having been looking after two poorly children all week. A decent selection of presents, and was nice to spend time with (some of) the family and be home. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=12/2010#04 Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:00:00 GMT Sunday, 14 November 2010 Up, good full Irish breakfast and then went to the ballroom for another "Early Bird Event": an introduction to Qt. This went well, but despite the improvements in Nokia's developer story, it turned out the "Nokia Qt SDK" included enough for Maemo and Symbian development, but not enough for desktop Qt development (on Windows). So, since the wifi was flaky, I did my app running in the Maemo simulator :-) Tim and I headed over to Aviva at 3pm to help set up - getting past all the security guards for the <a href="http://www.shamrockrovers.ie/news/35-news/1742-good-luck-today">Shamrock Rovers vs. Sligo Rovers</a> FAI Ford Cup Final by saying "we're going to set up a conference." Main reception were less welcoming, suggesting that we come back at 7pm, when the footy wasn't on. After too many people turned up to help then, a few of us wandered down from the hotel to a nice little Italian restaurant. After a bottle of wine and some pasta, we headed back to the hotel to put together the week's issue of <a href="http://www.mwkn.net/">MWKN</a>; and hoping to take the opportunity to recruit some more contributors and editors. Shortly after getting the laptops out and starting, one of the conference organisers pointed out they'd just finished setting up the Hacker Lounges: free beer, sandwiches, snacks, chairs, tables, table tennis tables, a Wii, an Xbox, a DVD player and foosball table. Excellent. This became our home for the next three nights... http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=11/2010#14 Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:00:00 GMT Saturday, 13 November 2010 Flew Aer Lingus from Birmingham to Dublin for the first day of the <a href="http://conference2010.meego.com/">MeeGo Conference</a>. Bright sunny skies of the Midlands turned to grey, cold, drizzle in Dublin; but wifi on the "AirCoach" from the airport to the D4 Hotels helped. Dropped in to Dave Neary's talk on debugging (been there, done that ;-)) but met with Tim - for the first time in a year - and caught up with Andrea and Ronan. So many friends and it was only the first hour: this bode well! The bridge building contest was <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/96141280@N00/5193079528/">great fun</a> with our bridge coming third, and managing about 20kg! In the evening, numerous people planned to rendezvous in Temple Bar, but having got separated (and a taxi); Tim, Andrea and I ended up in the upstairs gastropub restaurant of a pub at the far end of Temple Bar. Good food, a couple of pints of Smithwicks and we headed out into the cold to see who else we could find. We ended up in a bar called "3 Crowne Alley" with Henri, lbt, Tero, Niels and a few others with the live acoustic guitar guy playing all sorts of genres, from The Pogues, through U2 to Bon Jovi. Once we got back to the hotel, we were up until about 1am, putting the world to rights and catching up. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=11/2010#13 Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:00:00 GMT Tuesday, 09 November 2010 Angry. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=11/2010#09 Tue, 09 Nov 2010 12:00:00 GMT Saturday, 06 November 2010 Went to the <a href="http://www.spacecentre.co.uk/">National Space Centre</a> for its "Movie Mania" event (hooray for annual pass tickets). After some discussion Mel and the kids came as well, although Alex wanted a guarantee that he could "go upstairs" where "they" couldn't get him. To be honest, I'm sad enough that I'd've gone on my own. We saw: <h3>Star Wars</h3> Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Imperial Guard, Death Star gunner, Imperial pilot, scout trooper, clonetroopers, Darth Maul, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Aayla Secura <h3>Others</h3> A Cylon (TOS), Henry Jones Sr., Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Colonial Marines from Aliens, a Predator, Batman, Batgirl, a Halo marine, Chronicles of Riddick Necromongers. The "tour" of the Weyland-Yutani Biological Research Facility, unfortunately cut short by the escape of an LV426 xenomorph and our rescue by colonial marines, was also very cool and very well done. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=11/2010#06 Sat, 06 Nov 2010 12:00:00 GMT Thursday, 04 November 2010 Got new work laptop and started the laborious process of ensuring all the content (and reference source) is copied across. Kindle is still doing well, and the daily delivery of the BBC News is fantastic. I now need to investigate ways of making it possible for my friends to sign up to receive it to their Kindle accounts. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=11/2010#04 Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:00:00 GMT Tuesday, 02 November 2010 Interesting announcements at work which should start showing up in the press tomorrow. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=11/2010#02 Tue, 02 Nov 2010 12:00:00 GMT Monday, 25 October 2010 Fed up with The Guardian's full text RSS feed via feedbooks because of the lack of images (I've solved the lack of auto-update by cronjobbing a download of the <code>.mobi</code> and emailing it to my <code>@free.kindle.com</code> account so it only gets delivered over when it'll be free over wifi) I've had a thought that there should be a e-published only newspaper which will either be free or for a small monthly subscription. The newspapers on amazon.co.uk are at least £8 a month. In the meantime, I'm playing with automating Calibre to produce a daily copy of BBC News (and weekly editions of Ars Technica) and email it. De-duplicating the RSS feeds is a particular issue. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=10/2010#25 Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:00:00 GMT Friday, 22 October 2010 Kindle arrived today after I sent a couple of emails to Amazon asking why my order had been on "dispatching soon" all week. Initial impressions are very positive: the box is spartan, with the manual being on-device. I'm also impressed with the seamless integration of Amazon's book system, the power of <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/">Instapaper</a> and the wealth of new content being published for free at <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/">FeedBooks</a>. The browser is also surprisingly good: <a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/h/">basic HTML of Gmail</a>, <a href="http://touch.facebook.com">touch.facebook.com</a> and <a href="http://mobile.twitter.com">m.twitter.com</a> all work well. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=10/2010#22 Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:00:00 GMT Sunday, 12 September 2010 National Space Centre at Leicester held an "Exterminate!" today where people who'd built their own Daleks turned up and toodled them round the exhibition hall, whilst some minor guest stars from Doctor Who signed (paid) autographs; a TARDIS sat on a plinth with a couple of actors(?) dressed as The Doctor and Amy. There were only about five Daleks there, but they were very impressive. Alex was terrified though. Even when we let him control (via R/C) the head of one under construction and showed people getting in and out behind the scenes, he just couldn't grasp that they wouldn't hurt him. Kathryn was wary, and didn't like it when one responded "HE-LLO" when she said, "ello Dah-ick". Still, it was a cool day out; we've got annual passes now and there's a Lego "Brickish" event next month, followed by "Movie Mania" in November. http://www.bleb.org/writings/diary/&month=09/2010#12 Sun, 12 Sep 2010 12:00:00 GMT